Forget It, Jake. It's Infrastructure Week.

Heavens to Archimedes, it’s Infrastructure Week again! It snuck up on me, just the way it did the last time. Except, this time, it’s for real! Honest! But not real honest. From theGuardian:

Officials said the $200bn in federal support would come from cuts to existing programs. Half the money would go to grants for transportation, water, flood control, cleanup at some of the country’s most polluted sites and other projects. States, local governments and other project sponsors could use the grants which administration officials view as incentives for no more than 20% of the cost. Transit agencies generally count on the federal government for half the cost of major construction projects, and federal dollars can make up as much as 80% of some highway projects.

During a GOP retreat here in Appalachia, Ryan urged congressional Republicans to tackle “workforce development.” He messaged the somewhat amorphous phrase as a matter of “helping people”— not a budget-cutting excursive.

So, if you don’t die young in a bridge collapse, you can die of a preventable disease later in life. By the way, and as an aside, Paul Ryan’s extended family fortune was built largely on government road construction contracts. It was always Infrastructure Week at the Ryans!

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Is the financial structure of this deal dubious? Of course, it is. (It comes from the genius who went broke running a casino, after all.) There is something like $200 billion in actual federal money in this plan; the rest of the $1.5 trillion announced is a hodgepodge of tax incentives and wishful thinking. A lot of the infrastructure in the most desperate need of repair is in small, rural places where there are very few people with a lot of money to invest, unless there is a particularly lucrative network of meth dealers. And, as a professor told The Huffington Post,federal money as an incentive usually works only on projects where you can see a return on it.

“Using federal money as an incentive for private investment in infrastructure will work well for projects that can produce revenue, including toll roads and airports,” said Kevin Heaslip, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University. “But the return on investment for larger-scale projects, such as a road through a small town, is unclear. Trump’s infrastructure plan flips the traditional capital expense funding model from 80 to 90 percent federal funding to 10 percent federal funding,” Heaslip went on. “The majority of the funding mandates get pushed to the states and private funding, with the administration taking credit for the investment.”

By way of comparison, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the country needs to invest $4.59 trillion in itself by 2025. And you thought the debate over “internal improvements” had ended with the completion of the National Road and the Erie Canal. Hah, says this administration to your history.

Does the plan contain land mines for the environment? Big ones. For example, the power of reviewing oil and gas pipelines through National Park lands is handed over to Gulfstream Ryan Zinke with whom, I am sure, the future of our public lands, and of the environment generally, is safe indeed. (Credit David Iaconangelo of E & E News for the Twitter grab on this one.) There is very little bait in this plan for the switches we all know are coming.

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